The man who called himself Achille stared back at the gorgon, grimace falling simmering into the blank, conservative, passing background stare that reeked of an air otherly to the expected, diffidently shrugging away visage as he might a suit jacket, the sylph of a smile playing at his mouth, head down in a convincingly feigned pantomime of staring at his glass. A glimpse of something… something decidedly un-Achille teased at the rims of his corneas for a moment, something aged, repressed, unnameable, unenviable, sad, before the mirage flickered away with the fluid action of a lash.
To his pleasure, the woman who was once monikered Susan Mc Carthy mimicked the very playact the man had anticipated, and graced him with ignorance, complete and total, gazes intermittently locking on Autoine as a missile might before traversing around the space.
Like a deer, always flighty. Like the snake, always guileful. Disdain is her mask, like… The man grinned, staring at his nails.…No abject lies, just a rat-run of implied hypocrisies. Hiding significance in the open instead of the normal bushes. Ignite a flare to it and blind us all with light… His burning mind trailed, sitting languidly against the stool, averting focus, compartmentalising, suddenly, falsely interested by the Gaian silverbacks howling and diving in the adjacent treelines, nonchalantly suckling a cigar.
The silverbacks moved with a sedate, natural ignorance, and the prophet could not help but the compare the oxymoron he and Helen of Troy here presented – two accomplished liars, sparring slouched in the breeze, both anything but innocent. The imagery caused Achille to chuckle and he chair, reaching over the bar as he casually pilfered the very wine he had been tenuously waiting over, and poured himself a crimson glass, smiling at the smell that complimented so exactly the aromas of the false Gaian rainforest that stretched around the domeland, and contemplated just how much whoring Fortuna had bequeathed him.
Is it worth this, all these Harlequinisms for a silver-lined charade? The separations, the detachment, the… bitching isolations?Something inner reflected, as he stared at the jade reservoir of his sins. Yes. Quite possibly. After all, better a cloak of deceit than to be naked and preening.
The glass lay half unburdened on the crystalline edge of the bar, and Nadeau lay back and scanned the barely transparent panelling that passed for a skyscape, eyes fixed on the distant lines, blurs and trapezoids that formed the Torres. In the near distance, the withered, half-derelict hulk of a pilgrim liner maggoted its way through the tranquillity with a dull, dogged persistence, boring through the oxygen wisps as if it were at flight, not at sail, not in space, another strange relic of the deception of the upper Taus. Her hold would be stuffed with souls, her decks with souls, her cages with souls, her engine rooms with souls. Every space that could be utilised, packed wall-to-wall with fleshy, boated statues deep-frozen into a compact compliance, pods trellised over pods like crates in a sordid warehouse, frozen into a surreal ignominy.
A shame that one cannot dream when flash-frozen. Considering their latter employment, they should have one, bracing grasp at flight before a word where no dreams can escape….
…Objects cannot dream, after all.The Councillor self-reprimanded, nearly smacking himself back into character as his shield reactively fizzed, face a wreath of disinterest as turned away from the sky with characteristic, almost caricatured, disdain that crept and irked and snatched at his core, almost as if something hard, something thought to be immutable, had taken a slip from its hold with a measured, calculated precision.. Nadeau’s incisors brightened, an unobtrusive ear laconically angled towards the dialoguing individuals. There was a certain… brace… to the machinations that passed betwixed the two manipulators that had Achille, imperceptibly, rapt, a weakness visible only in the fixation set deep in the creviced crannies of his eyes. Susan wouldn’t notice, no. And the trusting, traipsing, showboating theatrics of Autoine left quarter for nothing but a dulcet personal oblivion.
“Tara. Mc Carthy. Susan. Tara…”He winked, whispering inaudibly to the palladium/gold alloyed lighter, flickering the implement before the hairs of his face, squinting in the light. “…So so many faces… So many failed, feigned slogs to maintain an air of silence. Decency. To conceal all the wakes you make, the ripples, the waves, before they drown you., lest they scare your prey”.
Flame on, flame off, flare on, flare off. Achille thumbed the lid down, and, without so much as an upward twinge, rapt a few, incongruous crypticisms into the depths of his PDA, deleted any and all incriminating tracer material of its sending, and slid the device placidly back to his lodgement.
At the far corner of the bar, the masked Gregar’s stiffened, a slight, sably nondescript nod visible in the cheek guards of his helmet before sidling into the blackness of the entranceways, uncannily without trigging any of the motion sensors that operated the corridor lights, falling into a lithe dark as black as the armour that swallowed him.
Achille remained mutely unobtrusive for a sequence of guiltless, innocuous seconds, before rising fluidly from the bar and back into skin of the vacillating character he method acted so well. I should have a dammed reward.
“…Say, cheri, I wonder how many individuals would end up being rather… extensively dead, if I so chose as to contact a particular cap-wearing individual to conduct a sequence of surveys.
“…We lack a flag, Susan. But we do bear a badge… here… If you follow…”He traced, pointed nails tracking at the left of his breast. A supine stare.“...I speak with the kind of sentimentalism that you, I, would deny, but here we both remain. Unmanacled entities in form, but yet sill bound to an ideal that defies any description, any quantifier that we can wall it in with. It’s in your heart – no, your brain, cheri – think of the pain it would induce you to defy that statement. Think of what you could lose…”
“…We are the norm. The normal. Unbroken by the spirit world though it lives amongst us. Visions, deceptions, mirrors and smoke. What was once the vestige of monsters, now, the vestige of men. And that’s what traps you here, what cages. Not guards, nor fields, nor guns nor bars. No. What keeps you here…” Achille gestures, intentness, palms spread, searching yet stable, stare pursed. “…What keeps you here, Tara, is aspiration.”
Without any indication of motive or indicative reason, Achille Augustain Nadeau vulpinely to Tara’s left ear, and lows his voice to an near imperceptible hush. Only the target herself was conscious of the rhetoric.
“…You consider yourself discerning.” Achille grins, with a narrow, derisive focus. “…You discern nothing, you grope in the darkness like blind, wild thing, driven by impulse. Do you appreciate now why I chose not to utilise that portentous compound you stashed with us? Why, as you implore, “I do not like you?”
“…Only name drop if you do not assume the individual concerned will not stalk you to ends of the sector to understand exactly what piece of the cosmic jigsaw he construes. Because I bear naught but a fuc<expletive>tonne of antimatter for those who attempt to play me like a wooden Pipe, you appreciate me?”
“When Jericho falls, there’ll be a reckoning. You’ll be honoured to be affiliated with the Commonwealth then, when the corpses start crawling over each other for the last, flickering, fickle, indefinite ray of starlight at the pile’s summit, only to greeted with the infinite alone amongst a world of persistent chaos…”
“…You conclude, you… assume… you assume “I do not like you”. Well, you’re wrong, cheri – you are one of the most diabolically interesting people I have ever placed a boot over, certainly more so than your cretinous conversation partner here, who prides himself as a diabolical genius. No.”
“I only believe the truth. A sinner’s life will encourage that in you. You receive individuals such as… ah, Katherine, The Good Doctor H, Jerad V, etcetera, who hasten the insanity. Now, before the Biblical apocalypse rears its existential head I am not going to be flayed to the floorboards because some some bloody enigma decrees. And this is why I’m begging you…”
“…I don’t need, but I would prefer, for you to stay with us, Tara – and by that, infer not that you should, or will, remain shackled to the roost, but that you merely wear our badge – nothing as eminent as a flag, just our spirit. I will not inhibit you, nor stop you. I may attempt to learn more about you on… more than a singular occasion, but I’m sure you have your countermeasures. Nor will I shoot you if I despise what I find. Make as many Omicronic voyages as suit you and your’s objectives.”
“…And I expect you to do exactly the same with me. After all, we are both individuals of absolute freedom, are we not?”
“…Shall we get started? It’s an honour, truly, to have you back with us, Tara.”
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)